Since 2016,Andrew Marantzhas been reporting on how the extremist right has harnessed the Internet and social media to gain startling prominence in American politics. One day, he was contacted by a woman named Samantha, who was in a leadership position of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. (She asked to be identified only by her first name.) When I joined, I really thought that it was just going to be a pro-white community, where we could talk to each other about being who we are, and gain confidence, and build a community, Samantha told Marantz. I went in because I was insecure, and it made me feel good about myself. Samantha says she wasnt a racist, but soon after joining the group she found herself rubbing shoulders with the neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer, at a party that culminated in a furious chant of Sieg heil. Marantz and the New Yorker Radio Hour producerRhiannon Corbydove into Samanthas story to understand how and why a normal person abandoned her values, her friends, and her family for an ideology of racial segregation and eugenicsand then came out again. They found her to be a cautionary tale for a time when facts and truth are under daily attack. I thought I knew it all, she told them. I think its extremely nave and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this.

Samantha appears in Marantzs new book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

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Samanthas Journey Into the Alt-Right, and Back - The New Yorker